Broken Crescent (2 page)

“The College asks for no small service,” spoke the acolyte in a half amused voice.

“You observed?”

“You expected any less from me?”

Ehrid grunted. “I will defer to you in the arcane arts, but it strikes me as reckless for you to stand so close to an officer of the College. Much less the Venerable Master himself.”

“Trust, dear Ehrid, they are so comfortable in power that the opposition of one such as I simply does not occur to them. Even should old Red Mask suspect any treachery, I am more adept and longer studied than he is. Settle your fears.”

“I have been wrapped in your web too long to have those fears. But I fear losing use of my guard in a half blind ghadi hunt. What phantoms do they chase nowadays?”

The plain-masked acolyte shook his head. “Do not dismiss the College’s phantoms lightly, Master Ehrid.”

Ehrid frowned and walked past the acolyte and leaned on the railing overlooking the ocean. Below him, half of Manhome sprawled and spilled over itself, crowding the plateau beneath Ehrid’s feet. “I have seen much lost because the College fears the invisible. I believe in threats I can touch and see. But the College will go to the World’s End to capture a thought, a myth, a dream. How should my guards arrest a dream?”

“I know what they seek, and I suspect it should be more tangible than a dream.”

“What should the Monarch have me do, then?”

“Do as the College bids you. But, of course, inform me of anything your guard might find on their behalf.”

“What do you expect us to find?”

“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something.”

S
OMEONE was stalking Nate Black.
What do you do now?
Nate thought while he stared at the flickering screen. The apartment was dark, his roommate asleep. The only sounds were the soft whir of the trio of fans on Nate’s over-clocked Athalon PC, the sound of Chuck snoring to himself deep in the bowels of the apartment, and the soft purr of Tux curled up in Nate’s lap.

It was three-thirty in the morning, and the windows were all dark, except the one window facing the street. From that window came the sterile mercury glow of a streetlight.

Nate read the e-mail for the tenth or fifteenth time.

A single one-line message.

Nate’s hands shook, and he rubbed his temples.
It’s been over six years . . .

Tux stretched and let out a feline yawn before snuggling deeper into Nate’s lap.

“Mind games, it’s only fucking mind games.”

Nate carefully looked at the header of the message, to assure himself that, like the last two, it had no header information at all. Nothing.

@ was good at covering his tracks. Not only did he delete everything but the cryptic “@” sign from his return address—no grand achievement, any idiot could spoof the From: line in an e-mail—but he also methodically erased
all
the header information. That was scary. It also shouldn’t have been possible. The only way Nate could imagine someone eliminating
all
the routing information from an e-mail would be to hack the mail server at Case and write the message directly in Nate’s inbox.

That meant that either @ was a good hacker in his own right, which did not reassure Nate. Or @ was on the Case Western IS staff, which would probably be worse.

Nate was very careful to delete the message from his machine. Then he telnetted to the mail server, and checked to make sure that it had been erased from there as well. Just having the name, Azrael, on his hard drive—
anyone’s
hard drive—made Nate nervous.

Azrael had done stupid, dangerous things and hadn’t been caught. Even though Azrael had ceased to exist six years ago, getting caught was the thing that Nate was most afraid of.

He shut down the computer. Firewall or not, he wasn’t leaving his box up on a live DSL connection unsupervised, not with @ out there.

“Mind games,” Nate whispered to Tux.

Chuck was still snoring in the back somewhere.

He shooed Tux off his lap and walked over to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and stared inside. On his shelf was a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, rye bread, cold cuts, and a box of Velveeta. On Chuck’s shelf was a 12-pack of Budweiser, a bottle of Heineken, a six-pack of Zima, and a paper bag from Taco Bell.

Nate grabbed the Heineken. He didn’t drink, but for once he felt he needed one. Besides, Chuck still owed him a five spot for the gas bill.

Since the bulb was out in the kitchen, Nate held the fridge open with his foot so he had light to hunt down a bottle opener.

He walked out into the living room and sat down on the couch, under the glare of the streetlight. He popped the top off the beer and it bounced off his knee to rattle on the hardwood floor. Tux shot by him, chasing after the bottle cap as if it was suddenly the most urgent thing in his life.

Nate took a long pull from the bottle, then he held it up against his forehead.

“What do you do?” he asked no one. “What do you do when someone is after you and you can’t call the cops?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” Nate lied. He shouldered the phone to his ear as he pulled on a pair of black jeans.

“I just haven’t heard from you all week.”

“I’m in the middle of midterms, you know that.”

Nate rummaged in the pile of clothes next to his bed and pulled out a red T-shirt that looked the least grungy. It advertised a local band called “The Electric Flaming Jesus Baby.” The initials E.F.J.B. hovered over a Derek Hess rendering of a burning nativity scene.

“You’re still planning on coming home for Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah.” He wanted to get off the phone, but he didn’t want to let on that he had anything on his mind other than midterms.

“How’s Sis?” Nate said, desperately changing the subject.

“Oh, Natalie just got acceptance letters back from Antioch and Oberlin. She’s so excited. . . .”

Nate nodded and made appropriate monosyllabic noises as he listened to his sister’s academic progress. There was a surreal element to it. The six-year gulf between them had seemed vast all his life, and now it struck him that some of the girls he’d dated recently were only a year older than Natalie, at most.

That realization actually made him feel farther away from home.

“She’ll be there, right?”

“Where?”

“Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Of course? Why wouldn’t she be there?”

“She’s eighteen now, she might have made other plans.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Sure I am, Mom. I got to get to class, though. Love you.”

“Love you, too. Are—”

“Bye, Mom.”

“Bye.”

Nate hung up half convinced that his mother knew all about Azrael.

Azrael was dead, six years dead.

Nate kept telling himself that.

He had methodically erased all his own records of Azrael, down to formatting and overwriting all his hard drives—twice—as well as shredding and burning the hard copy associated with his alter ego. Nate even hacked on to the ISPs where Azrael kept accounts, deleting all record of the handle. He had delved into archives, trying to erase any messages that had him as a sender or recipient.

Nate had killed Azrael three months before his eighteenth birthday, when it had finally sunk in exactly how much prison time he could face if he was ever charged with the shit Azrael had done.

No one had ever known that Azrael was Nathaniel Black.

Even when Nate was young and reckless, he had more sense than to allow Azrael to divulge his real name to anyone, however trustworthy. No one in the small hacker community knew Azrael was a sixteen-year-old kid named Nate who was going to Shaker Heights High at the time.

All anyone knew was that Azrael had a road map to get root access to systems owned by folks from ATT to the federal government. Azrael had modified the web sites of half a dozen foreign governments. Azrael had coded a virus that had made it on the national news. He had once even hacked Microsoft’s own web server and replaced the link to customer service with the e-mail to the attorney general of the United States. You name it, Azrael had the bragging rights.

Apparently @ did.

Nate was sitting on the arm of an overstuffed chair in the corner of the student lounge. He hunched over his PDA, prodding it with a matte-black brushed-metal stylus. He brushed unruly strands of hair away from his eyes as he stared at the little glowing screen.

The little device in his hand was Internet-enabled, and he had just downloaded his e-mail. That had been a mistake.

The new message from “@” had the subject “Last Warning.”

“Hey, man? You all right?”

The voice jarred Nate. He looked up from his PDA to see someone he barely recognized from his networking class. Nate looked at the guy’s buzz cut and thick glasses and couldn’t remember his name. For a long paranoid moment, Nate felt the pulse hammering in his neck and wondered,
Is this guy @?

After a moment he shook his head. “No. I’m fine.” He said it a little too sharply, driving home the fact he wanted to be alone.

“Sorry, you just looked a little—” The guy backed off when he saw Nate’s expression. “Right, none of my business. See you in class.”

Sam, his name’s Sam.
As he turned to go, Nate called after him. “Hey, Sam?”

“What?” He turned around. He looked more clean-cut than Nate had ever attempted. Button-down shirt, slacks, loafers . . .

“You ever commit a felony?”

“What?”

“You know, a felony. Something so serious that if you got caught we’re talking ten to twenty years.”

“Hell, no.”

“Come on,” Nate said. “Never sold drugs, boosted a car, broke into a house—”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What about hacking? Ever been in a mainframe you shouldn’t’ve been in? Fiddle with a virus?”

“Look, I’ll see you in class, Nate. Please don’t get weird around me.” Sam turned and left Nate alone in the lounge.

It was less than a minute to class, and Nate hadn’t opened the e-mail yet. He clicked on the header and watched the message window open. Just two sentences in @’s pithy style.

“They’re coming for Azrael. Take the road when it is offered.”

“What the fuck do you want?”
Nate cursed at the screen.

The first message from @, six days ago, had said, “They shall know Azrael’s name.”

That one sentence put Nate in a panic. He almost hopped a Greyhound right there. But he had a life, a family, and an education that had him ten grand in debt. He couldn’t just disappear, no matter how scared he was.

So he walked through the next day, verging on panic. But there hadn’t been any knocks on the door, no dark limos had slowed down to drag him inside—

But the messages kept coming.

He almost thought @ was taking out some sort of revenge. Nate told himself that he was falling into @’s trap by letting the mind game get to him. If the Feds actually had anything on him, they would have nabbed him long before now. There was a difference between suspecting that Nate Black was the late Azrael, and
proving
it. Nate knew for a fact that there was no physical evidence connecting him to Azrael.